Marcus Emanuel

Story statement: Ursula, in her search for her estranged father, attempts to join a cult-like “church of the human species,” where, to prove her allegiance, she must ruin the life of a seemingly innocent man. The antagonist: Viri, a 49-year-old man currently living in Chicago, is attempting to write a new gospel for humanity, to better align humanity’s moral compass by tying it to a new religious origin story. He intends to use Ursula for this purpose, in order to pay off a project he began decades ago with her father. He intends to manipulate her into forgiving her father for his sins in order to be able to write his new gospel based on her story. Breakout title: The Apocrypha; Alternates: The False Prophet; The Book of Ursula Comps: Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation; Tom McCarthy, C Logline: A young woman goes in search of her estranged father but, in order to uncover his fate and his true reason for abandoning her, she must embed herself in a strange cult-like “church of the human species” and risk destabilizing her view of the world and herself. Conflict: The primary conflict is that Ursula has to resist the fatalistic, intriguing worldview that Viri offers her — both because she finds it too demoralizing and because she intuits that, while she can’t say how, he’s attempting to use her — even as she must further earn his trust to discover what happened to her father. The secondary conflict is that Ursula has to attempt to not take advantage of Thomas even as Viri requires her to do so for acceptance into the cult, and as Thomas seems to be pursuing a relationship with Ursula. Setting: The story is set largely in Chicago’s northside, in the areas that normally would be overlooked and fall into the background but here come crackling to life as the narrative examines how hidden structures of meaning fill even the most quotidian environments around us. Ursula treks along the ugly, seemingly barren expanse of Western Avenue, populated largely by auto repair shops and fast-food drive-ins, as she attempts to make sense of Viri’s worldview. Her nascent affair with Thomas grows out of the sterile environment of a culture-sapped sports bar. She engages in a vigorous philosophical debate with one of Viri’s cult members in that member’s humdrum, immaculately clean suburban kitchen. She embeds herself in Viri’s paper-infested, rat’s nest of an apartment.